Fast Facts for Kids
Dark Matter Facts for Kids

Dark Matter Facts for Kids

The topic of this web page is dark matter, a form of hypothetical matter that scientists believe makes up around 85% of the matter in the Universe. This is the perfect resource for anyone interested in learning about this form of matter. We give you accurate and up-to-date information on dark matter. Along with below list of dark matter facts, we provide some additional resources to help you continue researching this topic.

The below dark matter facts will be helpful in your research. You will learn what scientists think dark matter is, what evidence exists to prove dark matter is real, how dark matter affects our Universe and other useful facts about dark matter. We hope these dark matter facts, data, stats, and information are useful in learning more about this hypothetical form of matter.

If you find any inaccurate dark matter facts below, please report it to us, and we will update them.

13 Dark Matter Facts For Kids

  1. Dark matter is a hypothetical type of matter found in our Universe.
  2. The reason dark matter is called “dark” is because it does not interact with the electromagnetic field.
  3. We cannot see dark matter; it is invisible because it doesn’t emit any light or energy.
  4. Dark matter played a very important role in the formation of all the galaxies in the observable Universe.
  5. The name “dark matter” was coined by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933.
  6. Cosmologists believe dark matter exists because of observable gravitational effects in our Universe that can only be explained by the presence of more matter than we can see or detected.
  7. American astronomer Vera Rubin was the first person to realize galaxies must be held together by the gravity of dark matter in the 1970s.
  8. It is estimated that about 27% of the Universe’s total composition is dark matter and that dark matter makes up around 85% of all known matter in the Universe, the remaining 15% of matter is everything we can see in the Universe.
  9. There is five times more dark matter than ordinary matter in our Universe, to put that into perspective, all the visible objects in our Universe are considered ordinary matter.
  10. The best supporting evidence of dark matter is how galaxies form and move, they would not exhibit the movement or form they way that they have without a large amount of matter we currently can’t see or detect.
  11. We do know where dark matter came from or when it was created, but we do know it had to been after the very early stages of the Big Bang.
  12. If dark matter is proven not to exist, we would need to modify the current laws of general relativity.
  13. Scientists are trying to recreate dark matter inside of particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in France-Switzerland.

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Dark Matter Resources

Hopefully the above dark matter facts, data, stats, and pictures were helpful with your research. If you need to continue researching dark matter you can use one of the below websites. We selected the below websites for their credibility and accurate data on dark matter.